Requirements for site structure

Permanent section pages

If the URLs of your main news sections change on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis, we may not be able to include your site in Google News. Non-permanent URLs prevent us from crawling your new content, as we're unable to detect the most current URL to be crawled. Our automated crawler is best able to crawl sites when the URLs of their main news sections do not change. If after your site has been accepted into Google News your main news section changes, update our record of your section URLs within the Google News Publisher Center.

Note: Googlebot-News is best able to crawl HTML links and is unable to crawl image links or linked embedded in JavaScript. Please make sure that your articles on your section pages only have HTML links.

In addition, make sure the anchor text that points to your article in your section pages matches the title of your article and of the page. If these technical requirements are an issue for you, a sitemaps-only crawl may be a solution. Please contact our team if you would like to try crawling your site exclusively by sitemaps.